Q & A with Lindsey Holliday on the Direction of Touristy and the Travel Industry

Lindsey Holliday is the Senior Inbound Account Manager for Touristy, a Denver based travel marketing agency. Lindsey drives strategy development and ensures it is executed flawlessly for all Touristy’s travel and tourism partners. We sat down with her to learn more about what she does and what she sees going on in the tourism industry today. Here is a bit of what she had to say.

How would you explain Touristy?

We do customer acquisition for clients in the travel industry. We help our clients attract potential customers via premium content offers and useful interactive content such as infographics, eBooks, videos and other mediums.

There is a ton of research that goes into consumers selecting where they will go on vacation and what they will do while on it. The purpose of creating this content is to offer potential customers helpful, engaging content at the different points along their research. We then combine this content with PPC, SEO, and paid social to come up with a solid, cohesive digital strategy to get people to this premium content on our client’s sites and to ultimately convert.

What is an example of some of the interactive content you create?

For one of our clients, who does luxury bike tours, we did a really awesome training guide to get their clients ready for their trips. There are four different levels of bike tours and we did a training guide for each level. This is a great example of content that is more bottom of the funnel. When customers are ready to book or have booked they go to the site and download the training guide.

Quizzes are also always good especially when a potential customer knows they want to go on a trip, especially an adventure trip, and they are open to different ideas of what to do. Asking them questions around types of activities, regions and budgets helps us provide them suggestions on where to go and what to do – while our clients also collect top of the funnel information about potential new clients.

What are some of the common issues you are seeing in the travel industry?

The biggest thing in travel is breaking through the clutter and really standing out. It is such a sexy industry with a lot of good players and a lot of big companies. With the mid-sized travel companies, we work with, they are going up against the Travel and Leisure’s of the world - and so the question is – how do we get them to stand out?

How do you help mid-sized companies break through the noise?

By really getting to know their clients and potential clients, answering their FAQ’s and alleviating their pain points. Sometimes it is a matter of researching existing customers and understanding who are they and what they want - while also understanding how the company is different than any other company. Qualitatively and quantitatively knowing these things helps us target the message and generate truly useful content. Useful is the key word. When potential customers are doing research online - we want our clients content to be there for them.

How do you leverage social, SEO and PPC in your efforts?

Social is huge for anyone - and especially travel. Facebook and Instagram are critical because they are so visual. Working with influencers who have a great following can yield great returns. Paid social, SEO and PPC is a big part of many of our initiatives. If you are going to create something really awesome – you need to make sure people can find it.

What are the trends you are seeing in content creation?

A good way to stand out is to have content that is highly visual. In the tourism industry that has always been the case, but now they are really stepping it up and venturing into mediums such as virtual reality. The huge amount of competition in the industry makes it challenging, but also fosters some amazing creativity. I thought the Westin Out of Office generator was genius. It was so fun and playful and so many people were using it to create their out of office responses. It was a great tool for brand awareness and driving people to stay at Westin hotels on their travels. An out of office generator doesn’t fit into the box of infographics, eBooks, and more traditional content offers and it was wildly successful. That is something that I try to bring to every campaign I work on for my clients.